Drømmekage (Danish Dream Cake)

On Tuesday my friend Åsne’s dog Kaos turned nine years old, which was a great excuse to bake a cake (for the humans celebrating). Yes, I’m finding lots of excuses to bake cakes these days.

Summer always puts me in the mood for coconut, so I decided to make a drømmekage, or Danish dream cake, which is a light and buttery vanilla sponge cake with an incredibly flavorful caramelized coconut topping. Seriously, the coconut topping is so delicious I would totally eat it on its own like candy.

Actually I would also eat this sponge cake on its own without the coconut topping, because it’s also so delicious. I think drømmekage is one of my all time favorite cake bases.

Drømmekage is sort of similar to Swedish silviakaka, as both are vanilla sponge cakes with a coconut topping. But the dream cake sponge is a bit richer than the Silvia cake sponge, which makes sense considering the Silvia cake batter is thinned out with water, while the dream cake batter is thinned out with melted butter and milk.

The dream cake also has a lot more coconut in the topping, so if you’re a fan of coconut you will love drømmekage. And you might even love it if you’re not a big fan of coconut – this cake is simply so good.

Drommekage history

Drømmekage has a really sweet history. Danish dream cake comes from the village of Brovst in Jutland. It gained popularity after a child entered her grandmother’s secret cake recipe in a competition and won.

I wonder how her grandmother felt about her secret recipe spreading all over Denmark and Scandinavia, but hopefully she was proud of her delicious creation, because drømmekage really does taste like a dream. It’s no wonder it’s become so hugely popular here.

Tips

It’s a lot easier to use a hand mixer to whisk the eggs and sugar together so that you can get them as stiff as possible. They should be very pale when you’re finished whisking. However you can also do this with a simple whisk if you don’t have a mixer.

Then you’ll melt the butter in a saucepan and add the milk. Set the milk mixture aside to cool a bit.

While the milk mixture is cooling, combine all the dry ingredients in a small bowl. Then sift them into the egg and sugar mixture.

I know we all often skip the sift when recipes call for sifting in flour, but in this case you really should run all the dry ingredients together through a sift or strainer when adding them to the batter. This will help you to stir the batter as little as possible, maintaining all the air you whisked in with the eggs, while still getting a totally smooth batter free from any lumps of flour.

You don’t want to over stir the batter, because then you can get left with a dense cake, instead of the beautiful light sponge cake you will get with minimal stirring.

Then pour the cake batter into your baking pan lined with baking paper and bake for 18 – 20 minutes, until the top is golden brown but not burnt.

You don’t need to wash the saucepan after heating up the butter and milk for the cake batter, as you can use the same saucepan again for the coconut topping (which also contains butter and milk).

You can make the coconut topping while the cake is baking, but move quickly, as you want to make sure it’s done when it’s time to remove the cake from the oven.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and then remove it from the heat. Stir in the brown sugar, granulated sugar, and vanilla. Stir well and then stir in the milk and coconut.

Remove the cake from the oven and pour the coconut topping over the cake. Use a spatula to even out the topping over the cake, trying to make it as even as possible. Return the cake to the oven and bake for 6 – 8 minutes, until the coconut topping is fully bubbling.

Keep a close eye on the cake in the oven as it’s baking at quite a high temperature and can burn quickly. You can test the center of the cake with a toothpick; the toothpick will come out dry when the cake is done.

And then the coconut topping should all be bubbling across the entire cake (not just in the center) when you take the cake out of the oven. So again, be careful removing the cake, as the bubbling topping is hot.

Wait for the cake to fully cool before lifting it out of the cake pan and cutting into squares.

You can switch the recipe from US measurements to metric by clicking from “US Customary” to “Metric” under Ingredients.